


close encounters

by Keter



Category: Paragon (Video Game)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 02:24:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7666687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keter/pseuds/Keter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gideon shares his four close encounters with death. (Content warning: a suicide attempt, war things, existential crises, and very light gore and body horror.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> What started as a vent drabble lengthened into a full headcanon backstory for one of my favorite Paragon characters. It was initially inspired by lyrics from Porcupine Tree's "The Sleep of No Dreaming." It's written in first person, which is pretty unusual for me, but it just fit.
> 
> Enjoy.

The first encounter I had with death was when I was sixteen. It was something that I felt I had been skirting for a long time before it finally happened. I wasn't sure what to do about the feeling, back then. I was afraid of what would happen if I actually bothered to do anything about it, and that was what kept me away from most of the awful decisions I could have made for years. It couldn't have kept me away forever, I guess, because I ended up tying a rope to the rafters of the attic while my parents were away one night.  
  
It took me forever to figure out how to tie a noose. I didn't have any books or guides on it with me, but I'd seen it done once or twice before, and I was smart enough to figure it out, unfortunately. I remember finally getting the knot into shape and not feeling any pride. I knew what I was doing wasn't any good. It just felt like putting nails in my own coffin.  
  
I was holding it up to the window's vague light to examine its veracity as an instrument of my own death when I suddenly noticed the night sky shining in through the rough circle of the rope. I realized, abruptly, that it was hazing in and out, as if it weren't sure whether or not it really existed. It was probably my own vision blurring, but at that moment I felt more connected with the uncertainty of the universe than I ever had before. If the sky wasn't real, then how could I be? How could anything have ever happened to lead me up to this point?  
  
I didn't even understand what I was actually "realizing." I just knew it confused me even more than I already was, and that hurried me in my efforts. I didn't really feel like thinking about whatever this was, or what it meant about my life so far. I just knew it probably wouldn't matter to the great uncertain cosmos if I got this over with.  
  
When I kicked the chair out from under me, there was a moment of excruciating pain under my chin and crushing into my throat before there was a sudden snapping noise and I promptly found myself dazed on the floor.  
  
I looked up. The rope had broken about halfway up to the rafters. Must've had a weak spot, and I was a bit heavy even at sixteen.  
  
 _Not today,_ the cosmos seemed to say.  
  
 _Okay,_ I assented, because I had just tried to hang myself, and failed, and was even more confused and upset than before.  
  
I had a sore throat for a week, but the rope burn was mostly gone by the time my parents got home, and I greeted them with the proper cheer, wearing a scarf.


	2. 2

My second encounter with death came when I was eighteen. I had been expecting it to come much sooner, but for some reason I never got nearly as close as I had dared that one night. In the end, it took someone else doing it for me.  
  
Having come of age, I had been drafted into the midnight militia by the local hawks. I had barely blown out the candles before I'd been given a sword, some cheap armor to keep in the closet after training, and enough insults from our commander to fill a book. The whole process never really fazed me, because I'd been preparing for the worst pretty much since puberty and this seemed like nothing. There was nothing the "force" (we were a hundred strong at best) or the commander could do to me that would be worse than what I'd already done, what I was already doing, to myself. And I was sure of that.  
  
And I was right, really, because when I saw a man choking, convulsing on the ground with his hand gripping his bleeding neck, I was all too aware of how much of my fault this was. All of it, was how much.  
  
I tried to tell myself, then and to this day, that it was self defense that had moved my hand. And that was the truth, really, but there's a guilt in your first... is murder the right word? because it feels like it is -- that you can't really shake.  
  
It was also my first use of magic, which was what had actually wounded the man, because I had dropped my sword in fright as soon as I'd been jumped. What can I say, other than that I had panicked? Panic had thrown my weapon from my hands, and panic had jolted like an electric current from my arm to tear open some poor man's throat. I don't even really remember that part happening, but it obviously had, because here now was some choking man reaching for me with a bloody hand, and my partner shouting something, sounding like he was yelling into a can connected to a string connected to just a little bit outside my ear. He sounded way more actively freaked out than I felt. I was just numb, under the pulse of the panic.   
  
This was only a patrol, one of our first. Nothing was actually supposed to go wrong. It was such a quiet town. For something to actually happen... It was too much like a story. Or a dream.  
  
It took me days to realize it had actually happened. Everyone was over it by then; it was just a bandit that had gotten terribly unlucky, to them. They were way more interested in a magic-user having been among them for this long without them having noticed. Honestly, I also wanted to know how I hadn't noticed. But the bitter part of me was unsurprised, and it acted like it knew that something like this was going to happen, like _this_ was how anything like this was going to be revealed.  
  
 _There is no gain but in loss_ , the cosmos seemed to say.  
  
 _Okay_ , I assented even though I didn't really understand, because I had killed a man without ever having meant to, and I didn't know what that meant for or about me.  
  
I stayed in the militia, carrying on even as our town was absorbed into the nearby municipality with its much taller walls and grander wars. The town's name, when viewed on a map, grew to seem much less like a name and more like a label. A label for _this_ much territory, _this_ much manpower.  
  
We all lost our names, eventually.


	3. 3

My third personal encounter with death was kind enough to wait until I was twenty-six. Eight years isn't really much in the way of things, but to someone so young who lived days so long, it was a good while. This event was also one of the most life-changing experiences of my... life, so I'm glad a slightly more mature me was the one to be stuck with it.  
  
By now I'd largely grown out of actively seeking out my own destruction, and I'd resigned myself to whatever life had to throw at me. This would turn out to be a poor decision, since life apparently had a lot to throw, but I didn't have the energy to put up a fight. Years of service had made me stronger, and years of free time spent doing research into the potential of magic gave my mind enough of a distraction to make me less cynical, but I still wasn't ready to just take the reins and go from there. Not yet. Not when there were still orders to follow, and murders to distance myself from -- both of which seemed to increase with time. They weighed on me like a palm pushing me six feet under, and pushed me forward into battles like the one I was led into in the mucky late summer of my twenty-sixth year.  
  
Most of my battles up to this point had gone like this: I led some troops forward, against woefully mundane adversaries, and wiped them off the field like cleaning a slate. My magic wasn't anything awfully fancy at this point, but it was more than most ever anticipated. Most enemies were plain human. Some had enchanted shields, armor, weapons. But I was the hand of uncertain cosmos come to push them from the earth, and there was nothing they could do. I tried to avoid looking them in the eyes or seeing their faces. I made that mistake a few times at the beginning, and all I could see was that bandit in their skins. Seeing him once had been plenty. I couldn't take any more than that. I let the armies behind me move forward and wear the blood, as if that would shift the blame, as if that would convince anyone.  
  
But that was most battles. The conflict of this particular summer would be different, because there, on the other side, was someone a lot like me.  
  
I never learned their name. Hell, I didn't get to see their face. I think that was probably intentional. Probably why we all wear hoods. If no one sees anyone's face, we're all just players in a game. You can knock someone over and pretend you've done nothing wrong because they were just a scarecrow, or a shadow, or like you're all just children playing pretend and you'll all stand up after the war is over and laugh and walk together with arms over each other's shoulders. And if no one can see you, there's no one to realize you are the one hurting all these people, and that the hand of god is only human, and that there is regret tearing through their features with every move they make in the game they pretend to play.  
  
But like I was saying, I never saw their face. I only felt the (actually rather impressive) force of their magic pile-driving into my upper back, and then feeling some pretty excruciating pain right after for the briefest second. It was a pain like that from the attic; something was on the verge of going horribly wrong in a way I had not foreseen, and I felt death kiss at the base of my neck. And then I didn't feel much of literally anything in most of my body, which was the real concerning part.  
  
I was on the ground again, looking up at the stars. I couldn't move. The whole experience was just way too familiar, and all at once the feelings from my younger days returned with a vengeance. I stared down the cosmos; I want to say that I didn't cry, but I've given up lying to myself these days. I cried like a child. What was the point of this all? After all this, I was back here. In an arguably worse position than I had been when I was sixteen. What could I possibly gain from this loss?  
 _  
There is sometimes loss without gain,_ the cosmos seemed to say.  
  
 _No_ , I insisted, wanting something more than this, but the cosmos didn't care about what I wanted.  
  
Eventually I blacked out. I would later hear, from a complete stranger, that the men I had gone into battle with had been decimated. I received no names.


	4. 4

My final meaningful encounter with death occurred when I was in my thirties. At least, that's what I assume, because after I blacked out I never did figure out quite how much time passed before I woke up, and during the several years (?) that were to pass _after_ waking up I was in an environment without any real sense of time. It was underground, and there were no windows or portals to the outside world, so there wasn't even the motion of the sun to indicate when a day began and ended; I just got up and went to sleep when told, like everyone else down there.  
  
I mean, at least I could move around again. Right, so that was a thing. I had to be carried off of the battlefield (which I don't remember happening), and some mysterious benefactor (who I still haven't met) had arranged for me to be taken to an operating bay that I later learned was stationed around where I woke up (underground). It was at that bay that some brilliant surgeon had burned/grafted/ignored medical law to attach what was essentially a magical chestplate/vest to my torso. I still don't know exactly how it works -- calling that surgeon brilliant wasn't sarcasm -- but it must've fixed my spine, because I could move as soon as I woke up.  
  
Again, I don't know how long it took me to wake up, but it must've been ages because when I did the scars from the surgery had already been healed. The skin around the edges of the plating looked a bit red and angry, as if they still wanted to reject the metal, but nothing hurt. The metal must've been enchanted, honestly, because it should've hurt from tugging at my skin and muscle, or at least been ridiculous and heavy, but there was nothing like that. My only real issue at the time was figuring out where I was.  
  
I would learn that this place was part of some weird underground experiment to harness the energy of the rift plane, which was one of the layers of reality above the one people are normally on. In theory, it was the source of most magic, though no one had ever traveled to it. That, I learned pretty shortly, was going to be my job. I was warned it might cost my life, but hey, I was the throwaway mage they'd dragged in from a losing battle. I might as well have been dead back then, so it didn't make much difference to me.  
  
It took a handful of what I assumed were years before we could actually get to that point, though. All that time was spent studying, mostly. Learning everything we could about the rift plane from what little we could observe from the outside. I was made to practice my own magic until I was more intimate with how it worked than I had ever been aware I could be before. Everything had to be as ready as possible before we actually initiated "serious testing," which was code for "Gideon going through a portal that we're going to try to rip open between dimensions," and which would probably immediately fail and be a serious waste of resources (my life, among other things) if we weren't completely on point.   
  
To spare you a lot of technical details, things were on point, and I made it across. This is the part where I wish I could start giving you details again, but there are no words for that place. A large part of that, I figure, is due to the fact that that plane isn't really observed with any of the senses we humans have. How do you explain being unable to feel, hear, see, or touch anything, yet experiencing everything so fully with your body and soul that it makes you mourn the fact that five senses are all you have? It defies explanation. Experiencing something like that -- it changes you. I know it changed me. It washed over me and crashed through my body in waves, washing so much mental filth away I felt physically lighter. All those years spent tired and angry and hurting -- why had I wasted my life that way? Why had I fought the world like I had, seen the cosmos as an enemy? I couldn't even be upset about that, though, because I could only feel absolute freedom in what I was experiencing _now_.  
  
I wish I could've enjoyed it longer, but it was only shortly after that cathartic entrance that I felt -- I _knew_ \-- something was approaching me. This was bad, the part of my mind that wasn't lost in the sensations of the plane tried to remind me. Especially because nothing in our research had suggested that there were any entities native to the rift plane, so I had absolutely no idea what was coming for me. All I knew was that it was _after_ me, like it knew exactly where I was, knew what I was, knew I didn't belong here.  
  
I immediately tugged on the magical tether that connected me like an umbilical cord back to my native plane. I hoped that the intensity of my pulling signified that it was sort of an emergency, and luckily for me it was received as such; I felt myself returning with all speed, but not before I was to have the closest brush with death I had experienced yet.  
  
In the moment before I was brought back to the native plane, I felt the entity move over me. It was heavier than the rift around it, and cold as the grave. I would not have been surprised to be in the presence of the Reaper, come to collect my struggling soul at last, at that very moment. But it's near-impossible to be false in the rift due to the plane's nature, and I felt in that split second that perhaps despite the entity's obvious power, it might not be entirely malicious. Which was good for me, because I felt it latch onto me as we were pulled out entirely.  
  
Once we were out, I didn't even have time to shout a warning to the others before I felt the entity slip away expediently, taking the form of a wraith in this physical plane as it fled. It took some time for the others to get any definitive answers from me about what I had experienced. We searched our base for days, but never found any sign of the entity again when we looked; it would only appear briefly to those not looking for it, seeming to grow bigger and more solid with each sighting. I can pretty honestly say I saw it more often than anyone else, and that didn't surprise me. I was the one that helped it escape, after all. We wanted to learn more about each other. We did get to, eventually. It even helped me learn more about the rift, and we ventured back into that plane a few times together.  
  
And I've stopped questioning the cosmos. It's still uncertain to me, but I've learned that that uncertainty is what has shaped me, for the better in the end, and it's what makes each new day one to look forward to, now. I can't undo the past, and I know that. But I can know that after all of this, I've gained so much more than I've lost.


End file.
